A cursory look at Mats Ohrman's email describing RTF confirmed the fears
of many. Of particular concern is the context sensitivity of RTF. This
makes ignoring RTF awkward, and blows half my argument out of the water.
I still have a concern regarding the introduction of another text format.
Though RICHMAIL is easily interpreted, mainstream word processors will
neither recognize nor generate it. So I will continue to send RTF
documents via mail when there is a 7-bit ASCII restriction or when
I am crossing hardware boundaries. Since the RFC does not preclude
this, I am covered.
If I want to cripple the other half of my argument, I can view the
RICHMAIL proposal as introducing simple formatting capabilities within
email, not establishing a new document exchange format.
This leaves one problem: should RICHMAIL be in the RFC? For two
reasons, I don't think it should:
1. it will delay the RFC because it is a whole new can of worms
2. it hides the proposal, which is applicable to any mail environment,
including X.400